As was the first volume of 52 Stitches, this second installment is a series of dark flash tales, originally posted for free at the 52 Stitches website run by Strange Publications’ Aaron Polson, one a week for an entire year. Why, then would one pay for a paperback — apart from the marvelous cover?

One very good reason I came up with while reading it was that these sharp little stories, none of them more than three pages long, could easily bring the bedtime story back into fashion for grown-ups. Ideally one would read one a night and it’d last a few months, but the problem there is that it’s like candy. You finish one and think, “Oh, that was good — one more won’t hurt”, and pretty soon you’re stuffed.

Fans of dark fiction on the fence about the flash phenomenon might find this a good starting point as well. The theme is just that, short and dark, which covers a lot of territory. Sometimes that can be disorienting and ends up feeling slapdash in an anthology, but these stories have something deeper in common that makes it work on another level: it might be called 52 Sucker Punches for the way it operates on a reader. If the writer’s job is to evoke emotion, it’s pretty impressive to land a jab in 500 words. Particularly when so many of them still hurt the morning after, as in this collection.

Familiar themes, but each reworked into something quick, clever, yet lasting. Some of the stories are almost poetry, they are so prettily but exactly written. It’s a bedside table book, for sure — though there’s always the issue of what dreams may come to deal with, after this one.

(As an important note, 52 Stitches 2 is dedicated to the memory of one of the contributors, Jamie Eyberg. All proceeds from its sale go to the Kennedy and Brendan Eyberg fund.)

Matador, it turns out, is Picador’s self-publishing imprint. I was quite surprised to find that out, since Disciple of a Dark God is one of the nicest paperbacks, physically, that I’ve handled in a long time – it’s solidly made, with a slightly heavier weight paper than most, and the cover art & design were very clearly done by someone with a real understanding of genre trends. Less so of swords, but impractical weaponry is also a long-standing fantasy tradition.

The book itself is very definitely the kind of swords & sorcery that everybody used to write (Leiber, Vance, early Moorcock, Howard…), and in general it’s energetically & atmospherically done. Our protagonist, Everus Dragonbanner (the last thing you could call him would be “hero”) is a historian turned assassin in the service of Xethorn, god of murder. This profession requires crypt-robbing, drinking in dodgy pubs, wearing a cool trenchcoat, investigating long-disused temples to chthonic deities, and long strenuous journeys to exotic locations. It could easily be a novelization of someone’s old school D&D campaign, and I’m sure I’ve seen stat blocks for death squirrels, the Eye of Evil, and that thing in Chapter 13 (whatever in Juiblex’s name it is) before. The plot structure is a classic bracelet fantasy; it consists of a sequence of plot coupons, each one at the end of its own quest, and intervening FedEx quests (“I won’t help you find the artifact you seek unless you go to this dangerous location and collect a randomly generated item for me”) to break them up. There are two main characters, Everus and his sidekick “Creeps”; others accompany them for a quest or two, until they meet some gruesome end, often at the hands of the main characters.

There’s one other characteristic of sword & sorcery novels that Glasby has kept (and exaggerated), however, and that’s the deal-breaker for me: this is the most toxically misogynist book I’ve read in a very long time, and if I hadn’t promised to review it I’d have put it down halfway through, washed my hands, and gone to read some Joanna Russ instead. For more than half the book, every single reference to women is a joke about prostitutes, or a derisive simile; the first woman with a speaking part appears on page 368, and I can do no better than quote her first appearance.

The door was opened by a tall, curvaceous beauty. She was outstandingly pretty; from her long, rippled hair which was a striking blend of rich lilacy-purple with flaming red highlights, to her eye-catching figure and modest but close-fitting clothes – all contributing to make Everus think she was a classy and highly expensive courtesan. She looked about his age.

“You look a little surprised,” she said, her voice a little husky.

“I…I was expecting someone else.” Tilting his head, Everus glanced over her left shoulder, checking that there was no one else with her. It was then that he was pleasantly struck by the mild scent of exotic perfume. The aroma was delightful and highly arousing.

I would like to assure you that – unlike the author, I feel – I was typing that quotation with both hands and without suggestive music playing on the soundtrack. Carrie (and if you feel that’s an odd name for a fantasy character, you’re not the only one) is a sorceress, of course, rather than a warrior, and serves as a support character and rescue object. Everus (inevitably) sternly refrains from sleeping with her even though she obviously wants it, and then his suspicions about her beauty are proved entirely justified when she turns on him and is revealed to have been a horrendously ugly succubus all along.

There is a second female character later on: Gwennifer Jannson, a competent and sensibly dressed general (though still described as a “slim brunette with long braided hair”) and it’s presented as entirely unexceptional for women to be officers; this would be a definite step forwards, if she weren’t there purely for Everus to impress, and if she survived longer than four pages.

I don’t want to risk giving the impression that the horrendous misogyny is this book’s only bad feature; it’s also rather classist and extremely fat-phobic. Glasby’s prose is faintly purple and occasionally rather clumsy, with sporadic outbreaks of passive voice. Overall, I wouldn’t recommend this book to women, anyone with female friends, or anyone else.